This is sick—Nathalie Lawhead (who I’ve covered as Tetrageddon before) has made this paper zine maker that recalls Paint Shop Pro, Kid Pix and Kai’s Power Goo. Design the pages and it’ll put the fold lines in. Love the pattern tool.

I’m pronto all over this in my school clubs—but here’s her announcement:

@alienmelon:
It’s out!
The Electric Zine Maker (public beta)
⚡ Easily create, draw, write, and print zines!
📝 Folding instructions included!!
✂ You can save them, and re-import them.
☺ Made with collaboration in mind.
✨ Try it! It’s free!! ✨
(rt’s appreciated 💕)
pic.twitter.com/0DgiC24XaN

Additionally, have to cite this feature she dropped a mention for:

@alienmelon:

…the other one is an “authenticity filter” that will put an authenticify shader over the zine to make it look like it was photocopies and printed a million times (kind of halftones + thresholding). so you can easily & quickly have an authentic looking zine.

What can I say? I love everything about this. This will go in href.cool, too easy.

I generally link, but now I am going to leech. He already posted this to /en/linking, but this list of assorted links that Joe has added to his pointers is just a blast. (I’m tempted to comment no further, since it’s fun to just explore the list without any direction.)

Nevertheless, I have to point out:

• The XXIIVV Wiki: I’ve wandered into the XXIIVV Webring previously. But this wiki of projects is damned impressive—both for its ambitions and for its actual hypertext.

• Cosmic Voyage: A small text-only community for story building. This has captured the spirit of dial-up bulletin boards in a way that I haven’t seen in decades. I’ve seen this here and there—glad to see it thrive.

• Chris Burnett: Fly gradients. The now page is the best I’ve seen. I like that it becomes a timeline. For the first time, I understand this phenomenon.

• Tales Through Photos: I just love the mood of this. No big deal. A site like this will never go viral. It’s just too light, just ‘I saw a Downey Woodpecker’.

• Bloganueva: Web dev at the National WWII Museum. Brilliant colors. @marsh on micro.blog.

The Web just keeps getting bigger. Can’t believe the encouraging work I find each week. Get in here, all you folks out there.

I don’t want to sensationalize this discussion or make it sound like a fight: Wikipedia is considering deleting links from about 5,000 different articles which point the reader to the Curlie directory—which is the current incarnation of DMOZ, spiritual successor to Yahoo!'s original directory. The issue is very interesting to me because, while the Curlie template is up for deletion because the directory is considered out-of-date, the argument has essentially moved toward the nature of large directories.

Finnusertop:

Although link directories are not as important as they were in the past, DMOZ (currently hosted by Curlie) is still recognized as the most important one. Ironically enough, the best contender to link directories today is probably the External links sections of our Wikipedia articles. And we don’t want to turn them into directories.

This is very interesting—because regardless of what Wikipedia intends itself to be, it often acts very much like a directory. (Or else what the hell is this?) I would argue that Wikipedia is a flat-out better directory than Curlie, because it is editorialized. In a way, this seems like it would be a bad thing for a directory—we like to think that a neutral classification of links is the ideal—but I think the intense effort to shape the descriptions and associations between links is motivating to the editors that have to keep the directory fresh and useful.

And, plainly, I just think a Curlie-style directory is too dry! Compare Curlie’s Board Games/Abstract category with Board Game Geek’s Abstract page. The generic directory page just comes off as… generic. And, honestly, Wikipedia’s List of abstract strategy games might be even better!

I’m starting to think that general directories went away (and expert pages) because the niche communities are just better. I can see why they were useful at the dawn of the Web.

Don’t know if personal websites are catching on again or if it’s all about finding the right vein—I am getting more and more impressed with what I find, what people are up to. I’m also finding more and more that are already all hooked up to the IndieWeb.

Some fantastic links littered the floor during yesterday’s discussion about the Web^[1]—there is just always more to see, isn’t there? This blog catalogs various public library projects—including its own Library (136 kilobooks in size).

What’s fascinating is that their library is just one peer in a network of book-sharing peers. (It’s with great fanfare that I now affix my ‘leeching’ tag to this post!) Yes, you can use their let’s share books project to host your own lovely library of electronic books. (See the dropdown that says 20 librarians online on the right-hand side.)

The blog has a wealth of interesting posts, including a tutorial on How to Be(come) an Amateur Librarian. As h0p3 has said, quoting Francis Bacon: knowledge is power^[2].

Noted by Eli here, this new project by @everestpipkin streams videos that are left with the camera-assigned title (i.e. DSC_5090.MOV, IMG_6715.MP4, etc.) and are likely raw, uncut personal footage.

Some videos I encountered while browsing:

• IMG 5631, by Bethesda Apostolic Church.
• DSC_2161, by charlesc3748.
• DSC4229, by shyi kai.
• IMG 9158, by Linh Hà.
• IMG_2442.MOV, by D25syed.
• From another viewer: 1009371.MOV.

This is a good channel.

I am not generally interested in time-management or productivity systems—because I enjoy being such a mess—but this is a case where my study of algorithms kicks in. The Fast FVP system—formerly the Final Version Perfected, previously Final Version, née AutoFocus—is an algorithm by Mark Forster for determining what to work on, given a large list of tasks. (However, since none of those names are descriptive, I think of it as the ‘hot and ready’ system, when I explain it to someone.)

It is based on the question: “What do I want to do more than X?”

Ok, I’ve added the flipflop tag to this blog, based on Brian Jones’ comment on the Hand Job Zine. Robin Sloan’s “Dancing the Flip-Flop” essay was dropped—and this link falls in place as a flipflop.

For H3333333K !Mediengruppe Bitnik translate a digital image error, a glitch, onto the façade of the museum House of Electronic Arts Basel (HeK). Applied directly onto the architecture of the building, the glitch misaligns the elements of the façade, bringing disturbance to an otherwise settled structure.

Yeah, check out the video—the glitch was added to an existing building, as if itself had been poorly rendered back to analog.

this is a very messy and unstructured inpsiring personal site no actualy it’s more of a collection of txts and links and sometimes it uses html other times it just uses a basoc json file no it’s a blog this person is also on other sites but i’m not going to tell you where becau i have just bought a lettuce form a door to door saleswoman tell me you wouldn’t focus on that if you were it too

I’ve stumbled across the link above (a list of personal portfolios compiled by Martin Pitt) and, well, this has been a bit of a recent trend:

• A Twitter thread by Jon Kuperman, looking for personal blogs (particularly personal “tech” blogs.)

• An ‘awesome’ directory combed from the above thread.

• ‘awesome-lite-websites’—might as well add this.

I am not going to look through the tech blogs, because I’m not as interested in those. (Except ones like ameyama.com which blends a greater portion of assorted personal thoughts alongside the tech tutorial-type things.)

Not the most obscure link—but I’ve not run across it before, despite it being around on Blogspot from 2010-2014, then on Tumblr until a couple months ago (“since tumblr is full of narcs now”) when it moved to the link above. The pic thief behind the blog is “Babs”—who did an interview with Vice in 2015. I collect these kinds of candid photodumps on my Visuals/Images page. This one mostly focuses on white trash photos dating from about the 1970s.

Relevant comment (to all my fellow hyperlinkers) from the article:

Has it been become more difficult to maintain the same level of quality and find compelling images and videos over the five years you’ve been doing this?

Yeah I feel like it’s harder to find photos actually. I have a bunch of tricks I use to find photos on the Internet and now so many photos I’ve already used come up which can be frustrating. I’ve gotten more submissions lately, which is so awesome because a lot of them send in photos of themselves/their own friends in the 80s/90s, and they’re not already on the Internet.

It’s still strange to think that the early Internet seemed like it was filling up with photos and writings and ringtones—it seemed that it would just be an avalanche from then on. And it is, but it’s all become mostly unreachable, much harder to find. I wonder how much of it is deliberate and how much is the nature of the platforms.

Seven issues total in this zine—I’m counting the gorgeous ‘FP’ complementary issues—which brings together scans of human hands caught in the Google Books scanning process. There is another zine out there of the same name; this is the one by Aliza Elkin—who also fashions animated GIFs from her findings. (Some background on this Twitter thread.)

She also points to this cool book from 1977: Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn By Atomic Bomb Survivors. This is all very eye opening. Some of the better high concept zines that I’ve seen!

I don’t know what it is—but this blog has stuck with me. I can’t even trace the links I went through to get here. (I think I started at either Nannygoat Hill or jill/txt—which are also very interesting blogs that I’m still trying to sort out.) I originally started at the post where a guest author talks about seeing Cocteau Twins for the first time—and then I just started occasionally stopping in to read back. There are some really cool video shorts linked throughout this blog.

I don’t know what you call it when you were nostalgic for times and places that you never experienced—sometimes I can feel this the minute I start some old Russian sci-fi flick or whatever Iranian ‘slice of life’-type footage I happen upon. But this blog has that kind of sensation. (I’m also wondering why I’m just linking to blogs and Tumblrs like these rather than commenting on them and trying to strike up a chat. I’m short on time lately—I need to remedy this.)

This feels related to some of the surrealist links that I’m beginning to explore—this is a Tumblr of imaginative horoscopes that has totally drawn me in. Half of what I link to are personal blogs that are confessional or kind of, I don’t know, internally exploratory; some of you might think that a blog like this isn’t very personal—it’s just humor, or maybe even could be thought of as externally exploratory.

However, I view this as a kind of prism into the author’s internal life and can be quite personal as you dig in. The author here is CARETAKER—Dane Asmund, who has a number of interesting projects—such as the Cosmic Mirror Games RPG and DOGS the gaem.

Scorpio: Nothing will ever be the same, the march of time is impossible to stop and boy is that a bummer.

Capricorn: Nobody likes crowds, so that tear gas grenade was for everyones benefit.

Cancer: Careful not to become consumed by the things you struggle with, it is easy to mistake the work for the reward.

Anyway, this has me on the prowl for more zodiac blogs—and for intriguing Tumblrs, to some extent—such as The Creature’s Cookbook, where an anthropophagic cryptid goes to blog.

After only eight posts syndicated to Mastodon, Joe Jenett—who I really respect as a linklogger—he’s one of my main links on the right-hand side of my home page—has been removed from their public timelines. I’m not trying to stir up controversy and say that this is the wrong call—posts syndicated to messaging platforms can look like noise to them—but I think it’s good to talk about what’s up here.

The problem (from the Indieweb point of view) is that the Mastodon public timeline (toot.cafe pictured at left) is a place to participate in the overall conversation—that instance’s inside jokes and tags. So it has a somewhat narrow view of what’s ‘relevant’—it expects some degree of participation.

However, I see that Eli Mellen is also active on Mastodon and does some syndicating there—although I don’t think it’s automatic. It looks like he does it by hand.

Which is something I’ve noticed as I’ve been syndicating to Twitter. Some posts just get mangled in the conversion and look more like noise than actual participation. I start to feel like I’m syndicating to a random forum where I’m still a foreigner. It feels like senseless self-promotion, rather than when I syndicate to IndieNews because I have something that fits the topic.

(As an aside, it might be interesting to start a Mastodon instance that basically acts like micro.blog. It’s for syndication, but also feels like a community where you go to find other blogs. Huh—this could work.)

I’m fresh into this link—so I don’t quite have a clear picture of this fellow (Michael E. Karpeles)—but I see a kind of h0p3-like thing going on here. A huge, straight-up link directory that is definitely in the public self-modeling vein.

Related project: fromscrat.ch done in the same fashion. This is a rabbithole, no doubt about it. See what you can find.

This is Kevin Kovacs’ personal thoughts collection—along the lines of h0p3’s wiki—with daily plans and reviews of the day, link logs. There’s an enclave of others doing this kind of thing with TiddlyWiki—this is an example of how to branch outside of that.

I also think it’s interesting that Kevin has a separate (presumably ‘public’) site at The Independent Variable. It seems that part of the point is to syndicate the ‘public’ site and keep the ‘personal’ site separate—“because of the frequency and mundaneness of posts.” This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been messing with, too—except that I have a home page for broadcasts and an unfiltered page for the raw dump.

I confess to having many sour feelings for capitalism—so I don’t ever link to company blogs, out of a kind of disgust. But I am trying to do better: I can’t let those feelings turn into yet another kind of misanthropy. Here I’ve found a splendid blog about packaging design that has been running since 2007, authored by Randy Ludacer.

It’s difficult to gauge the obscurity of a blog, but this one seems to have few comments and few incoming links, given its age. Perhaps it is quite prestigious in some circle out of sight—well deserved, if so. It is a trove of exquisite shapes and diagrams. The author has a true passion for the crafting of cans and boxes. The age of this blog has also paid off—many of its posts go several levels deep with an investigation.

Since Indieweb.xyz seems to be useful to some of you, I’m working through a list of updates that will clean it up and make it more versatile.

The first major change is to add another language, German, at the request of Matthias Pfefferle. (The German edition is at indieweb.xyz/de.) The Github project that I am linking here is where new languages and translated text can be submitted.

I’ve also hidden the hottubs sub from the home page. This will allow you to test the system without broadcasting to everyone.

These are all the changes for today, but I wanted to let you all know out there that I have got my hands in the code again, in case you have any requests you want to call out.

Krikey—I’ve been working on this directory for five months! I am not quite happy with all of it. But it functions mostly like I want it to. And the links are fine, as a start.

I will discuss it more over the next few weeks—mostly I just want to get it started so that I can start connecting with Joe, Brad and the rest of the world. Hope you find something you like!